Fox Hill Deer Shouldn't Be Targets For All

Jim Spencer

I was driving along Harris Creek Road in Hampton trying to decide if there was a deer problem when a four-point buck answered my question.

He walked out of the woods a few hundred yards in front of me and stopped in the middle of a blind curve.

I had enough time to slow down. Any driver coming around the bend in the opposite direction would've had a freezer full of venison and probably a bill for some front end body work.

This is definitely not the way to thin out the overpopulation of deer in the Harris Creek neighborhood.

Neither, unfortunately, is the way the Hampton City Council is thinking about doing it. On first reading, the council voted to allow the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries and the police to issue hunting permits to individual property owners if they can prove deer damage or if they own enough land to accommodate hunting. People with permits can shoot deer on their property or designate the duty to someone else. The council, which holds a second reading on the policy Dec. 10 at 7:30, will leave the details of implementation and enforcement to game wardens and cops.

Unless the city tightens things up considerably, their battle cry will drown out the sobs of animal lovers who refuse to admit that the deer around Harris Creek and Fox Hill now pose a risk to human health, be it Lyme disease or road kill.

Paul Thielen said it perfectly Tuesday night at a meeting of the Fox Hill Civic League: "The city ordinance, as written, allows for a broad interpretation. An authorization for hunting could fuel poaching."

Those who don't think poaching is already a terrible problem in Harris Creek and Fox Hill should speak to residents who are awakened at all hours of the night by gunfire.

"There are people using rifles in the dead of night not able to see 75 feet in front of them," Thielen said. "A round from a rifle can travel a mile easily."

That's why the council needs to reconsider its hands-off approach.

"We need an ordinance written in a way that it can't be miscontrued or taken advantage of," said Thielen.

Right now, they don't have it.

While a ride along Harris Creek Road reveals an undeniable deer problem, the same ride shows how troublesome a hunt controlled by individual property owners could be. The Harris Creek area includes roughly 1,000 acres. Neither the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries nor the Hampton Police Department has the manpower to prevent the slaughter or the recklessness the council's open-ended proposal invites.

No one with any expertise has bothered to scientifically quantify the problem. So it isn't clear how many deer need to be removed. Some of the locals talk about 300 to 500 deer. Game wardens talk about estimates of 140 to 200 deer. But no one seems to be able to describe the methodology of any count.

Once the shooting starts it will be too late.

Worse, Harris Creek is too densely populated with people to declare anything approaching an open season on deer. Folks may not live as close to one another as they do in Hampton's suburban subdivisions, but many of them are close enough to become intimately acquainted with their neighbors' buckshot.

Real hunters recognize that. Ravneous deer have mowed down 40 azaleas in Joe Mendel's yard. But Mendel doesn't want to encourage any more gunplay near his Fox Hill home. He wants any deer hunting limited to bows and arrows.

Thielen would take things several steps farther.

"Two controlled hunts, very carefully and precisely delivered" at the north end of Harris Creek Road and along Windmill Point in Fox Hill "would have enough affect on the deer population to control it for several years," he predicted.

Sadly, Thielen's civic league didn't agree and voted to support hunting approved by individual property owners.

That endorsement looks like a recipe for disaster because of where a lot of the deer are found. They congregate in fields near the road and in people's yards, where they behave like unleashed house pets. There is, for instance, no need to construct elevated shooting stands for the Harris Creek hunters. Just let 'em lean out of second-story windows and, like as not, they'll have a clean line of fire.

One of the 10 deer I happened upon on my late afternoon drive walked out of a marsh as I drove past. He stared at me for a moment, then sauntered up the road indifferently. This "wild animal" would be as hard to find as a bass in a barrel. If you didn't want to shoot it, you could probably hand-feed it arsenic.

Regardless of the rules established by the game wardens and the cops, such easy targets will be irresistible to the boys in blaze orange.

Unless those boys are hand-picked and very closely supervised.

Here's why the deer problem in Harris Creek and Fox Hill should lead to a tightly monitored party of hunters, some of them armed with tranquilizer darts:

Outside of Bosnia, free-fire zones have a hard time passing for urban planning.